RIP Pegasus Mail :: Email client recommendations?

[pne]

Probably my first contact with email software was with Pegasus Mail back in 1992; I imagine our company had chosen it because it integrated well with the Novell network we used back then.

Since I was already familiar with that program, and since it was free, I installed it at home as well; I think I used "Microsoft Internet Mail and News" (the precursor of Outlook Express) for only a couple of months before I migrated to Pegasus at home, probably in late 1992 or early 1993. I've been using Pegasus Mail as my mail client ever since, for about fourteen years.

Every now and then I've toyed with moving to another program (especially since Pegasus Mail didn't support UTF-8 for a long time), but the amount of mail I had saved in Pegasus format, and the fact that I was used to it, always put me off.

Now Heise Online has reported (in German) that Pegasus Mail will no longer be developed. Apparently, David Harris had considered releasing Pegasus Mail completely for free (including the manual, which one used to have to pay for, as one way of donating), while Mercury, a mail server, would become a "semi-commercial" product, but it seems that plans have changed: the front page says that Pegasus Mail and Mercury will both no longer be developed.

Pegasus Mail can still be downloaded for now, but the download page is no longer linked to from the front page.

A pity.

I believe that David Harris had originally made the program available free of charge because he had the philosophy that basic Internet software should be free, and that people should cooperate with one another—the kind of spirit that was, I suppose, more prevalent during the early days of the Internet, before it became ubiquitous. (Another example of that kind of spirit is in SMTP: little concern for things such as authentication, as mail sites tended simply to trust one another.)

Sic transit gloria mundi. (That's Latin for "Gloria threw up in the bus on Monday.")

Perhaps I shall have to consider a bit more seriously moving to another email program. I do use Webmail a whole lot more than I used to (especially Gmail and Fastmail.FM), but I still read messages at home, and having a program that's still being maintained may be useful—even though Pegasus Mail still works for me.

Does anyone have any recommendations for an email client for a Windows machine?

Comments

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

yup. Thunderbird.

Thunderbird

[pne.livejournal.com]

Is there something specific about it that you like, or that makes it superior to other programs?

I've considered Thunderbird, but I wonder how many people use it because it's part of the nebulous Mozilla thingy, or because it's the geek thing to do, rather than because it's actually better.

What made you choose Thunderbird?

Re: Thunderbird

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

Oh, I personally use google webmail.

My dad, however, switched from Outlook to Thunderbird after he heard too many stories on auto-executions of malicious files and security problems and whatnot, and he says for him it's a very similar experience, but he has really come to enjoy Thunderbird more, because the Address Book function is much better (it's supposedly a lot easier to add recipients to a newly composed email, etc). It's also relatively lightweight and clean, and loads faster. He also says the interface is pretty intuitive (at least to someone who has used Outlook ;)

I suppose from a security point of view, Thunderbird is definitely superior to Outlook.
I did use it once, it was an older version and I was pretty content with it, until I quickly realized that I simply prefer webmail, because it's instantly accessible wherever I am.